office.
'You don't have any proof that Izzo sent them.'
'They were working for Lenny Corazzo and he's Izzo's son-in-law.'
'I work in the real world, Jonah. You think I can bring in someone like Izzo for questioning or get a search warrant based on that? You should have called us when you had Tallarico in your office.'
'He told me everything he knew. And I have his address.'
She copied it into her notebook then flipped it closed. 'All right,' she said. 'We'll bring him in for questioning. See if he has an alibi for Glenn's murder. Now let us do our work here. If there's a connection between these two killings, we'll find it.'
'Three killings,' I said.
'Maya Cantor's death was ruled a-'
'I know damn well what it was ruled.'
One of the crime scene techs lowered his camera and looked at Hollinger. She grabbed my elbow and steered me into the kitchen. 'Listen,' she said in a low voice. 'I value your opinions, I do. I respect your judgment. But don't raise your voice or second-guess me in front of my team. I'm a Homicide detective, Jonah. I have to let the facts speak for themselves. Facts, not guesswork or theories. The most the coroner did was concede Maya could have been-could have been-pushed. Not that she was, not even that it was likely. We are actively investigating the links between Glenn and his work for Cantor Development. We're looking into his bank records, his phone calls, his email. If there's a connection to Maya, we'll find it. And we'll do the same thing here. If Will Sterling was killed because of something he knew, we will find evidence of it. Evidence, Jonah.'
Her arms were folded across her chest, her lips tight, and her eyes, those eyes, whose colour always seemed to fall in the warmest part of the spectrum, looked flat and cold.
'Are you done with me?' I asked.
'Is this you pouting?'
'No, this is not me pouting. This is me asking if I'm free to go.'
'I'll have to check with Neely,' she said. 'He's the lead on this one.'
Neely was about forty and had a brush cut that would have made a drill sergeant stand up straight. He made me go through everything from the start again: why I had been there, why I had broken in, why I thought Will's death was linked to other deaths. He took no notes, just stared at me while I spoke. After he'd heard it all, he said to Hollinger, 'You buy any of this crap?'
'We'll check it out,' she said.
'You know where to find him?'
'Yes.'
'All right,' he said. 'He can go.'
'Thanks,' I said.
'After we test him for gunshot residue.'
CHAPTER 22
At nine o'clock the next morning, I was back at the Earth Sciences Building on Willcocks. News of Will Sterling's murder had hit the students and administrators hard. I approached a group of people who were crying and consoling one another. One red-eyed young woman walked me over to a man in his early twenties with a mass of dark curly hair pulled back in a ponytail and a soul patch that grew two or three inches past his chin. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve when we were introduced. His name was Jason Eckhardt and he had been Will's lab partner in their analytical chemistry course. We walked slowly down a polished hallway to a brightly lit lab with white walls, white countertops and white fluorescent lights buzzing in the ceiling like trapped, angry flies.
He sat next to some kind of spectrometer and told me to pull up a chair. 'Before I say anything,' he said, 'I want to know everything Will told you.'
'That won't take long.'
'I'm listening.'
'I know that there is something wrong at the Harbour-view construction site. Will all but confirmed yesterday that it has something to do with PCBs.'
'Not just any PCB,' he said. 'One of the most toxic of all, something called Aroclor 1242. Extremely dangerous for people and other animals. A known carcinogen-that means it causes cancer-the liver being the most common target organ. It's also a developmental toxicant, meaning it's very bad for unborn children. And it's suspected of causing a host of other illnesses or symptom clusters in shore birds, reptiles, amphibians and most likely humans as well.'
'Where does it come from?'
'Most commonly from coolants in electrical transformers and turbines.'
I thought of the decommissioned generating station across Unwin Avenue from the Harbourview site, the transmission towers along Commissioners Street and the other heavy industries north of the site, and wondered whether long-buried toxins could have seeped into the earth.
Jason showed me a printout from a gas chromatograph. It looked like the results of a polygraph done on someone who made wild swings between truth and lies. 'Our course requires us to collect and compare soil and water samples from different sites, one clean and one dirty, analyze them and report the results. Will did most of the collecting.' Jason looked away and swallowed and sucked at the inside of his cheeks. 'We were perfect lab partners,' he finally said. 'I love the machines. The mass spectrometer, the gas chromatograph. Loading up the tubes and watching them cycle around. Interpreting the results and confirming the hypothesis. Will was the outdoorsman. There's nothing he liked better than collecting samples, getting all muddy and buggy. I used to wonder if he actually rolled in the muck like a dog, he'd come back so dirty. He didn't have as much patience for the tech side, which was cool, because that's my thing.
'This first sample,' he said, 'came from soil we knew to be contaminated with this stuff, on a site that once housed an oil refinery but hasn't yet been cleaned. As you can see, it clearly identifies a high level of Aroclor 1242. Dirty, dirty soil, not the kind you'd ever want to build on, not without extreme remediation.'
He laid a second sheet of paper beside it. 'This was supposed to be the clean sample, the one we compare the polluted soil against. But look at these peaks and valleys, the way they scan from left to right. It's Aroclor 1242 again.'
'Where did this one come from?'
'Down along the lake, near Tommy Thompson Park.'
'At the Harbourview building site?'
'Yes.'
'The lakefront parcel, where the park is going to be.'
'That's why I thought there must have been a mistake, that maybe I had gotten the samples mixed up. I told Will we should collect new samples and run them again. He didn't want to. He wanted to call the developer of the site and get in his face about it-he's a lot more confrontational than me-but I told him our final marks depended on it. So he collected another sample. It took time to run-there's only one chromatograph here and it's constantly in demand-but in the end the same results came up. That's this third sheet here. Same chemical makeup as the first two. Confirmed presence of Aroclor 1242.'
'When did you tell him?'
'Yesterday morning at class.'
Will had told me before class yesterday morning that he could guess what Maya and her father had been arguing about… that he'd know more about it later in the day.
'Did Will ever mention Maya Cantor to you?'
'The girl who killed herself? Sure. Her father is the one building those condos.'
'Did he tell her about the samples?'
'Definitely. He was hoping she could-I don't know, pressure her dad into doing something about it. That's why he was so bummed when he heard she died. I think he felt like she bailed on him just when they were getting
